Mearsheimer on the current state of play in Ukraine

  Russia "wins" (achieves stalemate after conquering lots of territory) over the long term unless something extraordinary happens.

If Russia loses, though, we risk nuclear war.

 

U.S. Healthcare

From Naked Capitalism:

“The government giving up on COVID protections means throwing immunocompromised people to the wolves” [Salon]. “The doctrine of the medical model is so ingrained in our culture that it shapes the way Americans understand the concept of health. The medical model focuses on preventing and treating individual conditions in individual bodies, rather than correcting systemic factors that affect people at the community level. It’s a reductive approach that ignores the social determinants and forms of discrimination that shape health outcomes. It’s concerned with correcting deviations from a normal defined by the absence of disease and disability. Individualism — even when it’s billed as morality — cannot protect people from an airborne, ever-mutating virus. This normal is not neutral. According to the medical model and the moral model it evolved from, people who are sick or disabled are abnormal and “bad“, lacking both good health and, presumably, good morals. The medical model is the blueprint for a US healthcare system that profits from the fear of this abnormal. Our for-profit system offers band-aid solutions for individual body parts rather than care for the complex, interdependent relationship between the sick and disabled body and mind. American healthcare is the least effective for those with the greatest needs, and that’s not just an unfortunate side effect of the system– it is the system.”

Milton Friedman - Inflation Deceiver

(c) by Mark Dempsey

 

The narrative explaining inflation coming from every conceivable media outlet--including Jon Stewart's podcast interview with Steve Hanke--is Monetarist Milton Friedman's statement that "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." This explanation is at least inadequate.

To understand where he comes from, know that Friedman's economics gave respectability to the notion that profit excuses any bad behavior. He said corporations owed their shareholders only larger profits, and they owed their workers and communities nothing--exactly the opposite of the considerations that guided public policy conversations when limited liability corporations were invented. 

 

Yet thanks to well-funded backing, people continue to believe the plausible fantasies that Friedman's economics promotes. His manifesto Free to Choose is not only still in print, it has a page full of videos translations, and other promotional material on its Amazon page. The rebuttal--Not So Free to Choose by Friedman's student Elton Rayack--is out of print, and roughly seven times as expensive to buy. Could big money be behind this state of affairs? Friedman's economics certainly favor the plutocrats.

Here's an excerpt from the shareholder profits link above: "The shareholder value theory ... failed even on its own narrow terms: making money. The proponents of shareholder value and stock-based executive compensation hoped that their theories would focus executives on improving the real performance of their companies and thus increasing shareholder value over time. Yet, precisely the opposite occurred. In the period of shareholder capitalism since 1976, executive compensation has exploded while corporate performance declined. "

Friedman's economics influenced those replacing the Chilean government in 1973 when the CIA helped install human rights abuser General Pinochet as the Chilean leader and overthrew the elected Allende government. Friedman's "Chicago Boys" were the top economic advisors to Pinochet, and any economist who disagreed was exiled or assassinated. Apparently winning the argument about what's legitimate economics justifies even killing! ("Both the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture [Valech Report] and the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation [Rettig Report] approximate that there were around 30,000 victims of human rights abuses in Chile, with 40,018 tortured and 2,279 executed. ")

"Commenting on developments in Chile, the conservative British journal The Economist observed, 'Chile, under the stern eye of President Pinochet, has provided laboratory conditions for a prolonged experiment by Mr. Milton Friedman's disciples...Chile is another economic disaster. The 'Chicago boys' have gone grey watching their achievements...slowly wasting away.'" - p.70 Not So Free To Choose , by Friedman's student, Elton Rayack.

"Contrary to Friedman's claim that Chile's free-market experiment is an economic miracle, the overwhelming evidence indicates that the experiment has been an economic disaster. In eight of the nine years under the Chicago model, the unemployment rate was in the double-digit range, three to four times greater than the average of annual employment rates in the decade prior to the takeover by the junta, and in 1982 and 1983 soared to well over 20 percent. Throughout most of those nine years, real wages were significantly less than what they were in 1970 and in 1983 they fell below the 1970 level by 13 percent.

"The record on economic growth is equally deplorable. In the decade of the 1970s, while Latin America's (19 countries) per capita gross domestic product increased by 40 percent, Chile's rose by a mere 8 percent. By 1982, Chile's per capita GDP, as a result of a severe depression, was actually 5 percent lower than it was in 1970." (Ibid p. 72)

The Chilean economy has lagged behind other South American countries' economies too...so just on scientific grounds, Friedman is baloney. His theories don't match reality. If you're curious about this, read Not So Free To Choose. After you read it, you'll understand why I say Friedman was lying all the time in his theories. 

Escaping The Prison Of Mainstream Culture:

from Caitlin Johnstone (in New Zealand)

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Many people turn to conservatism and religion because they perceive — correctly — that mainstream culture is a fraudulent sham bereft of meaning and authentic values. Their solutions are misguided, but their reasons arise from a perception of a very real problem.

It isn’t actually necessary to turn to religion or conservatism to find depth, meaning and groundedness; depth, meaning and groundedness are always abundantly accessible. But nothing about western culture makes this obvious, especially in the mainstream.

Turning to religion and conservatism as a solution to the degradation of mainstream culture is just replacing the modern systems of mass-scale thought control with the old ones. It’s a completely maladaptive solution to the problem, but you can’t ask people to just keep participating in a worldview that feels like it’s sucking your soul out of your body 24/7. You need to offer them something nourishing and authentic. Nothing in mainstream liberal culture offers this; it’s self-evidently phony, soulless and vapid.

This isn’t something the left can just dismiss. There needs to be something on offer which meets these needs better than both mainstream culture and the regressive belief systems which caused so much suffering in the past.

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Feminism was supposed to mean freeing women from oppression and inequality. Now it means shooting off Palestinian children's feet with sniper rifles. https://t.co/9CxfRiZBKh

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 23, 2023

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It’s incredible how much money the Americans can afford to blow just on exploding stuff overseas. Their healthcare system and infrastructure must be phenomenal.

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Communism is such a non-thing in the west that western rightists have to make up imaginary communist threats to be afraid of, pretending devoutly anti-communist institutions like the Democratic Party and the World Economic Forum are communist, or that “woke” stuff is communism.

If you have to make up imaginary communist threats to give your ideology meaning and purpose, you have a dumb ideology. Making an identity out of being anti-communist in the west is like making an identity out of being anti-dinosaur. Stop being ridiculous and do something real.

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No normal person is asking for digital IDs or central bank digital currencies. They’re being supplied without any demand, for the benefit of the power structures supplying them.

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If a western-backed Ukrainian offensive on Crimea leads to a series of escalations culminating in nuclear armageddon, only about 200 people in the entire world would think it was worth it, and none of them live in Crimea.

pic.twitter.com/kkyIEXhOgp

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 23, 2023

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So much is lost due to the fact that modern science and academia don’t research western domestic propaganda and its effects, because they don’t acknowledge the existence of western domestic propaganda. As a result, there are no studies or data anywhere on the most sophisticated and widespread psychological operation of all time. And this is of course because our academic fields are captured by the same influence interests as our media and tech and every other means of controlling the information westerners ingest.

This leaves us unable to scientifically study how we’re being programmed at mass scale. Because there’s not research and data, we can’t even talk to most people about the most significant thing that’s happening in our society. Unless you’ve spent countless hours researching the many systems of imperial information manipulation, it’s hard to believe it’s even happening.

This is the only reason those who talk about western propaganda and Silicon Valley information manipulation get branded conspiracy theorists. It’s not because the evidence for our position on those issues isn’t abundant, it’s because it’s not officially acknowledged and studied.

Domestic propaganda is the most overlooked and underappreciated aspect of our civilization, because it causes people to think, speak, work, shop and vote in ways that perpetuate the status quo. You should be able to get a PhD in its study, but you can’t even write a thesis on it.

The most important thing you need to know about our society is that all our means of understanding our world are being aggressively and continuously interfered with by powerful people who benefit from the status quo. They’re actively meddling in our perception of reality.

Debunking the Debt Ceiling Kabuki

Debt! It's scary!

(c) by Mark Dempsey

You are as likely to get a straight answer from a conventional economist as you are to get the truth from your opponents at the poker game.

"...sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” - the Red Queen

The headlines about the debt ceiling negotiation are increasingly strident, warning that the U.S. is going to "run out of money." But most of the population remains clueless about what government debt is, thinking it's like household debt. Nothing could be further from the truth.

First, unlike a household, the U.S. is a monetary sovereign. It makes its own money, unconstrained by how much gold we have--dollars are a fiat currency. Most of the dollars are not even printed, they are typed electronic entries in accounts at the Federal Reserve ("the Fed").

Consequently, the Fed can issue dollars without limit, just as there's no limit to how many inches the Bureau of Weights and Measures has. There are resource constraints, but for a fiat currency issuer, there are no financial constraints.

On the other hand, the U.S. can self-sabotage.

But don't taxpayers inevitably have to sacrifice their dollars to pay this debt? No, dollars do not grow on billionaires. The federal government doesn't need the population's money to pay its debt. It can make the dollars it needs any time..

Federal fiscal policy is not "tax & spend." Where would taxpayers get dollars to pay taxes if the government didn't spend dollars out into the economy first? Taxes are necessary to ensure there's a demand for dollars, but they do not fund federal spending.

More accurately: government first spends, then retrieves some dollars in taxes. What do we call the dollars not retrieved in taxes--the ones in your wallet or savings account? Answer #1: the dollar financial assets of the population. Answer#2 (describing the same thing): National 'debt.' This is similar to your bank account, which is both your asset and the bank's debt. Asking the bank to reduce its debt (i.e. your bank account's size) is not very sensible.

So dollars are Federal Reserve Notes, and notes are IOUs. The Fed carries currency on its books as a liability too. Reducing the debt would mean reducing dollars in circulation with either tax increases or spending cuts.

What are you owed for a dollar? A dollar's worth of relief from an inevitable liability: taxes. The obligation is from the government to the noteholders, not from taxpayers to anonymous bondholders.

The U.S. has fallen for the "Fiscal Responsibility™" con seven or eight times in American history, and every time it's followed by a wave of asset forfeitures like the Great Depression. Perhaps the most dramatic of these occurred when Andrew Jackson paid off the entire debt in 1835, removing all public currency. People did their business with specie (gold) and roughly 7,000 varieties of private bank notes of varying reliability--a commercial nightmare. The Panic of 1837 resulted from this exercise in self-sabotage, and the ensuing poverty contributed to the outbreak of Civil War a few decades later.

Actually, rather than advocating a "fiscally responsible" government, the debt ceiling controversy aims at cutting spending for Social Security and Medicare. Sure, our military budget is ten times Russia's and three times China's, but it's grandma who must tighten her belt. The agenda is "labor discipline"--the message that poverty and suffering will follow if you don't take whatever crappy job is on offer. Labor discipline is the whip in the hand of our feudal masters.

So...will knowing this help resolve the debt ceiling crisis? It's possible. It's also possible that our public policymakers will sabotage the economy. There are plenty of politicians who want to undermine the government. The suffering caused by default would certainly be real, but the anxiety over "unpayable" debt is pretense.

Not enough protein: Vegan dieting

 

 

 

Then there's:

 

Also, as our diet gets less healthy:

 

Nearly four times more drugs than 2000!

 

...or...

 

 

 

There are gigantic animals who are herbivores, from brontosaurus to elephants. Vegetables have plenty of protein.

 

For those interested in exploring the downside of a high-protein diet, try Garth Davis' Proteinaholic: How Our Obsession with Meat Is Killing Us and What We Can Do About It. Davis is a bariatric surgeon who wrote the book so he wouldn't have to perform so many stomach staplings.

 

On the anecdotal side, my very athletic friend, Keith, ate almost exclusively protein...and died of kidney cancer. After all, protein is just a carb with a Nitrogen atom or two attached, and unless we're growing children, we don't use the protein to build cells, and we excrete the Nitrogen. That's why urine is an excellent Nitrogen fertilizer.

 

Then there are my friends adopting a low-carb keto-, Adkins, paleo- diet that is heavy on meat...roughly the equivalent of practicing Russian roulette as a way of avoiding suicide.

 

As for artery disease (heart attack, stroke), vegan is the clear winner there too. See Caldwell Esselstyne's Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease lecture. It's a little long, but well worth the trouble.

Or see Dr. Barnard's lectures (like this one):

 

 

Or you could read The China Study by Colin Campbell.  Campbell helped supervise the largest study of the connection between diet and health ever conducted...and the book mentions additional studies. Campbell is a former Columbia University biochemist who grew up on a dairy farm, consuming lots of milk and meat. Since he did his researche, he currently travels the country promoting a vegan diet.

...I don't usually say anything about diet. It's personal and more controversial than politics. And there are differences in digestion and the intestinal microbiome that may make a difference. So...your mileage may vary. After all, testing for glycemic index--the speed with which food turns into glucose in our blood stream--indicates there are wide variations in digestion. Some people eat ice cream and it spikes their glucose right away. Others eat it and have no glucose spike. My money is on the ice cream as a cause of glucose spikes, but that's not true for every single person.

Meanwhile, on Netflix, try The Game Changers (athletes, including Arnold Schwarzenneger!) or Forks Over Knives, or What the Health!

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